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SANDEE BRAWARSKY
Special to The Jewish News

feels a new degree of closeness toward
him.
Solotaroff then goes back in time
to his earliest years, recalling growing
up in Elizabeth, N.J., pulled between
the bully-like Solotaroff side of the
family, and the more refined relatives
of his mother, who was also treated
harshly by Ben.

ed Solotaroff wanted to
name his memoir Rach-
mones. He was certain that
there wasn't a Jewish reader
who wouldrit understand the word
Leo Rosten defines as "pity, compas-
sion" in The Joys of Yid-
dish.
But his editor, and a
random sampling of
In - Truth Comes in Blows.
younger Jews, convinced
him otherwise. "It's what
Cart' 101. essalist and critic
this book finally is
T e d Solorarog . tai -kles a
about," says the 70-year-
old distinguished editor,
memoir of his 011'71 1 1 Ie.
essayist, critic and now
memoirist.
The actual title, Truth.
Comes in Blows (Norton;
$23.95), comes from
Saul Bellow's Henderson
the Rain King. A coming-
of-age story set over the
first 20 years of his life,
Truth Comes in Blows is
about the author's trou-
bled relationship with his
father, Ben Solotaroff, a
self-made business suc-
cess, who was overbear-
ing and brutal at home.
It's his father who
delivers the blows — and
for whom he now feels
rachmones.
The book begins in
the recent past, in the
last two years of Ben's
life, when Ted, the oldest
ty
of his three siblings,
Ted
Solotaro
attempts to help his father, then sepa-
He writes
Finding
\_. rated from his fourth wife.
about the bar
rachmones.
"We had been estranged for many
mitzvah his
years, though 'estranged' isn't quite
father wouldn't
right since we were mostly strangers
pay for, an early brush with juvenile
ro each other from my adolescence
delinquency, sexual yearnings, sum-
on, and yet remained tensely connect-
mer days at the Jersey shore; some of
ed across the long silences of the four
the few pleasant moments with his
decades that followed," writes
father are when they go hiking
Solotaroff.
together.
In one of the book's most tender
As a boy, Ted was an athlete and a
moments, the author consents to give
reader, but had to give up after-school
his aging father a massage, pressing
sports in order to work in his father's
his fingers into the shoulders and
plate-glass factory. But he kept on
arms that had beaten him. Hearing
reading, and was drawn ro a life of
his Father's "humming gratitude," he
the•mind.
"I began to realize by the rime I
Sandee Brawarsky writes about books .
was 11 that the place I wanted to live
from her home in New York City.
was in my aunt's apartment building

PAUL AND JIMMY PANAGOPOULOS,
AND CHEF THEODORE OF THE
NEW AND OLD DOWNTOWN
PARTHENON AND
LEO STASSINOPOULOS,
NOW BRING FINE
AUTHENTIC GREEKTOWN
CUISINE TO YOU.

CVlisfeee414,04.,

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DAYS A W

1/29
1999

Detroit Jewish News

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